Lady Lovers

Joanne: After World War 1, waves of African Americans migrated to the North, seeking economic opportunity and a reprieve from Southern racial violence. Called the Great Migration, this mass exodus brought an influx of young and single African Americans into major cities like Chicago and New York.

Nathan: Crowded together in boarding houses to afford rent, African American migrants often occupied single sex spaces. This was intended to limited promiscuity and prevent prostitution but in reality, it allowed same sex relationships to flourish, creating the first queer black community networks in the process.

Brian: At about the same time, the advent of the blues took the entertainment industry by storm. As this new music genre gained popularity, female singers, like Ethel Waters or Gertrude Ma Rainey, now had an outlet to express a queer black identity to mass audiences.

Nathan: But as historian Cookie Woolner explains, changing notions of gender and sexuality in the 1920s made some feel uneasy about what they considered to be the new sex problem.

Cookie: So we really think of the early 20th century as when kind of this idea of gay or lesbian identity is beginning to solidify. Before that people, were familiar with the notion often of same sex sex although sometimes between women this was not really even an occurrence yet but it wasn’t seen as something that kind of was a featured part of one’s identity. We didn’t really talk about having a sexuality or a sexual orientation yet but by the 1920s, this ideas beginning to solidify and especially in the black press we’re beginning to see a lot of articles talking about lady lovers. By 1929 we’re seeing articles about lesbians, unusual types of women for example so this is kind of becoming these new identity categories that people are learning about and they’re also seen as identities that are specifically flourishing in the North in cities like New York and Chicago and so people are starting to wonder if this is kind of a new sex problem, as one article refers to it in 1920.

Nathan: What about the cultural landscape where all of this is playing out? I have to imagine, when you think about the great migration and certainly the urban North in places like Chicago and New York, you have things like Jazz music or the Blues. How would we describe, say, race records, you know, the idea of black music really being mass produced and how that impacted the possibility of celebrating or even talking about same sex behavior?

Cookie: The Blues record, the Blues industry, the entertainment industry serve as really important meeting places and new cultural representations of queer identity and specifically queer black identity. We have singers such as Gertrude Ma Rainey as she is known, who are singing very explicitly queer songs. By the late 1920s we have prohibition era performers such as Gladys Bentley who are doing drag performances and flirting with the women in her audiences at this time and it’s really also significant that the race records industry is creating jobs and work opportunities for thousands of black women who, again, had often limited opportunities outside of domestic work or if they were college educated being a teacher so having the opportunity to go on these touring vaudeville circuits to perform in cabarets and theaters in the North and South is really opening up the world for thousands of women who are then going on to kind of decimate these queer representations throughout the country and kind of serve as role models of women living a very modern new life.

Nathan: One of the most famous performers in this period was a woman named Ethel Waters. Tell me about her.

Cookie: Yeah, so Ethel Waters is definitely considered one of the most successful, popular black celebrities of the 1920s. She was actually born in Philadelphia and she first became well known singing in cabarets in Harlem in the early 1920s and she was tall, she was lean, her first nickname was Mama String Bean. She was seen as more sophisticated than some of the other Blues singers, especially ones who came from the Deep South.

Cookie: But Ethel Waters was seen as very sophisticated, so much so that she was signed to Black Swan which was one of the only African American owned record companies of that time and they wanted to kind of put forth more respectable, high-culture representations of African Americans which was also very symptomatic of the larger Harlem Renaissance going on at that time as well, this kind of reach towards high culture to kind of show a different representation of African Americans than they assumed many whites were familiar with.

Nathan: And she also had a same sex relationship during this time, yes?

Cookie: Yes, so she had a partner whose name was also Ethel so they were known as the two Ethels. Her name was Ethel Williams and she was a very successful dancer at this time. She was a chorus girl in some of the early black musicals on Broadway and she had her own success as well as a dancer and the two of them went on tour together while Ethel Waters was recording for Black Swan and of course this was something that the men who owned the record company wanted to kind of keep under wraps so when they wrote promotion materials about Ethel going on tour, they would just mention that she was touring with her maid but they very much wanted to present her as heterosexual and single and very desirable to men.

Nathan: When Ethel was performing her music, I’m assuming she had certain strategies for maybe providing hidden transcripts or hidden meanings in her songs.

Cookie: So one strategy that the two Ethels had for kind of referring to their relationship in public was since they were both romantic partners as well as performance partners, one would go out on stage at the beginning of the show and say where’s my partner? Where’s that Ethel? And spend all this time going around looking for her and in a comedic fashion and this was one was that the two women were able to kind of refer to their relationship out in public. It’s kind of an open secret. Many queer relationships were considered to be an open secret at this time, something some people knew about but didn’t really talk about since it still wasn’t really acceptable in society so by being able to kind of use this type of terminology and these type of strategies, they’re able to, in some ways, kind of refer to or appeal to the queer people in their audience and let them know that they’re kind of part of their community and there’s other people here like them whereas something else like that will kind of go over the heads of the straight people who won’t be offended and won’t really know what’s going on.

Nathan: And at the same time, some artists actually ventured more overt allusions to same sex desire. Can you talk about Ma Rainey and her song Prove it on me Blues?

Cookie: Yeah, so Ma Rainey writes one of the most explicitly queer songs of this time period but again, even the title kind of hints at the fact that she can’t yet really fully outright claim a lesbian identity at this time. That’s not really possible yet so the song is entitled Prove it on me Blues and all the lyrics are kind of teasing the audience by kind of suggesting a queer identity or a masculine presentation but then kind of saying you can’t prove it on me, you didn’t see anything. So for example, in the lyrics she says went out last night, had a great big fight. Everything seemed to go on wrong. I looked up, to my surprise, the gal I was with was gone.

Cookie: But then she goes on to say, nobody caught me. You can’t prove it on me. She even then says that she was out with a crowd of her friends and they must have been women because she doesn’t like men but again, you know, you can’t, you didn’t actually catch her with a woman so you can’t prove it on her. So this type of kind of teasing the audience was one of the strategies she had at this time and it’s also significant that we don’t actually know of any woman she had a serious romantic relationship with. We have different rumors around her flirting with women, even one scandalous rumor about her taking part in a same sex orgy but we don’t really have specific evidence of women she had relationships with so if that was the case, she was in a better position to kind of broach the subject than someone such as Ethel Waters who actually did have relationships with women and didn’t brag about it in song.

Nathan: Right. Now one of the classic tensions, obviously, of artists who are trying to commercialize their talents is selling to a mass audience. So here you have artists who are using hidden and overt allusions around questions of sexuality, particularly black women’s sexuality, and at the same time you have record companies that are having to market these musicians and these artists to a largely heteronormative audience. How can they pull it off?

Cookie: Well, Ma Rainey, she recorded on Paramount Records which, like many of these race record companies as they were known, was a white owned company and they seemed to be interested in putting forth the kind of tantalizing, titillating representation of her, again in order to sell records and so we have an ad that runs for this record that’s printed in the Chicago Defender in 1928 and in the image Ma Rainey isn’t dressed up in the usual more feminine clothes that she usually wore, she usually, like many of the classic Blues women wore a lot of feathers, jewels, very kind of ostentatiously feminine clothing, but in this image she’s wearing a man’s fedora, and a blazer, and a vest and a tie so basically menswear from the waist up and she’s featured on a street corner with a couple other women in similar clothing and then, in the ad, there’s a policeman waving his baton behind them and then the text of the ad even kind of points to this and says something to the matter of what’s Ma Rainey up to? Look at that policeman, what’s going on in this scenario? And then of course the hook is, to find out, you have to buy the record. So they’re kind of taking advantage of this new interest in lesbian visibility and women’s masculine clothing fashions at this time that kind of goes along with the flapper image.

Cookie: This kind of image of a new socially liberated woman, regardless of her sexual orientation. So they’re kind of using this imagery and also kind of hinting at the illicitness of this with the policeman in order to get people to buy the record so they seem to be happy to be kind of cashing in on these ideas, these new ideas around queer sexuality.

Nathan: How would you describe the role of the black press in popularizing music that is basically being queered at this time?

Cookie: I think the black press is playing a role at this time by making images and songs about queer African Americans more visible by printing these ads, by running various gossip columns that are kind of talking about the goings on of different figures within queer Harlem at this time, and then of course there are some people who are talking about this who are concerned about the future of the race, about the potential of race suicide if there’s more queer relationships, women aren’t getting married and having children, but oftentimes it’s kind of through talking about queer behaviors and these new queer subcultures in a negative light, that they’re actually serving to bring visibility to them every time they mention the name and address of a club where one of these performers is going to appear at, right there. They’re decimating this information to interested readers who are learning about these new subcultures from the black press.

Nathan: In thinking about the development of these musical forms and the Great Migration and the importance of queer networks in advancing both of these processes, how have we changed what we think we know about LGBTQ history in America more generally?

Cookie: I think it shows that queer African Americans have played a really significant role in creating the queer subcultures of the urban North due to the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, the new negro movement that was going on in the 1920s and 30s. They really played a formative role in creating these new ways of life that we see as not necessarily as tied to nuclear family or kind of expectations of reproduction, these kind of, especially for women the idea of being able to be more autonomous and make a life without a man. I think we’re seeing a lot of really important examples coming out of these Blues singers of the 1920s who are putting forth ideas around being proud of your sexuality in a very bold way at a time that no other white performers are really kind of talking about these issues of gender and sexuality.

Nathan: Cookie Woolner is a professor of history at the University of Memphis. Her forthcoming book is entitled, The Famous Lady Lovers: African American Women and Same Sex Desire before Stonewall.